Weather Is Not Climate

"Choosing shorts or long underwear on a particular day is about weather; the ratio of shorts to long underwear in the drawer is about climate."

-- Charles Wohlforth, "The Whale and the Supercomputer"

You probably noticed there were fewer Atlantic hurricanes this year. Melting Arctic sea ice came extremely close to but didn't break the record minimum of summer 2005. And today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, announced two months of cooler-than-average temperatures across the United States.

So what happened to global warming?

Scientists who study climate say they get that question every time there's a cold spell. Their answer: It's important to keep in mind an important concept.

Weather is not climate.

Weather, as we all know, is what we see in the day-to-day, often unpredictable fluctuations in local temperature, humidity, precipitation and wind.

"The fact that we had a couple of cool months doesn't say anything at all about long-term trends," said Mark Serreze, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. "It's just a clear example of natural variability on the climate system. The long-term averages are decidedly toward a warming planet."

Kevin Trenberth, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, agreed.

"Weather is chaotic. It has an infinite amount of variability, and that's just the nature of weather," he said. "Weather dominates on a day-to-day basis, and there will be warmer period and cooler periods. But it's the overall pattern that gives you the climate."

And that, said climate scientists, means the occasional cold snap is not inconsistent with global warming, just as a heat wave may not by itself indicate global warming.

Temperatures

Long-term trends in the data tell scientists that the planet is getting warmer. Weather events that suggest otherwise are to be expected, they said.

"We have a gradual warming of Earth's system, but that is interspersed with a strong natural variability in the system," Serreze said. "This is just the way the system works."

Scientists also note that the five-warmest annual temperatures in the last century have all occurred in the last eight years. NOAA said today that globally, temperatures for October are well above average, and the month was the fourth warmest on record.

The average global temperature has risen by about one degree Fahrenheit over the past century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents hundreds of scientists studying climate change in the United States and worldwide, predicted future temperature increases this century of anywhere from two degrees to eight degrees.

Hurricanes

In 2005, for example, there were a record 27 named storms during the North Atlantic hurricane season, including Katrina, Rita and Wilma. The 2006 season, while an average season, was much quieter, and no storms hit the U.S. coast.

The Pacific, on the other hand, has seen an intense hurricane season.

Typhoon Saomai, a Category 4 storm with sustained winds up to 150 miles per hour, drove half a million Chinese inland, caused massive flooding, and left 900 fishing boats lost at sea. No one knows how many people were killed.

Hurricane Sergio, which is not threatening land, is currently churning across the Pacific and is the 19th named storm of the season.